It’s cliche to say that government procurement needs to be fixed, but much of the conversation around this topic happens randomly on social media, in a vacuum through exclusive or elusive groups, or through traditional organizations that operate in a closed, dated mindset with respect to broader inclusion or true innovation.

There are so many smart, passionate people sincerely dedicated to changing government procurement. What’s missing in this effort is a truly open, collaborative, specialized community focused on supporting one another, facilitating ideas for improvement and delivering a knowledge base of best practices.

What’s needed is stronger leadership within the disparate government procurement community to lead on these fronts. For government officials, it can’t be about how much you know about the nuances of procurement and the endless blockers that create the innovation stopgap. For vendors, it can’t be about how your product will solve all the problems. It must be about all aspects of the ecosystem coming together to have the conversation, cultivate the community and holistically transform government procurement at scale.

I’m not a government procurement enthusiast, but I do see a critical need for something like Procurementeers to move this much-needed transformation forward. I do not need or want to own or manage this community. I simply want to propose a way to facilitate this, so we can change procurement at scale.

My fear is that if the government procurement community — especially those who champion themselves as leaders — don’t address this topic in an open, inclusive, collaborative way, we’ll continue to experience the fixed, reductionist and incremental mindset and momentum we’ve seen to date.

Procurementeers is my attempt to inspire those who are passionate about changing government procurement with the hopes that this helps jump start your efforts.

If you’re excited about leading government procurement transformation and would like to take over Procurementeers and run with it, email me at luke@govfresh.com.

Written by former United Kingdom Government Digital Service founders and leaders, Digital Transformation at Scale provides insights into the steps to take to create a functional, sustainable, accountable, scalable organization that is a conduit for government change. The granularity of advice, such as what to do first — first team, first 100 days, first projects — to sharing the work to ensuring failing projects are stopped to promoting savings are extremely insightful and practical.

As the authors note, digital is more than just technology:

“Digital transformation is not all about technology; it is about changing the way you work. … [It’s] about building a new type of organisation around internet-era principles, not adding technical complexity to try and fix analogue organisations. It means changing how an organisation runs itself in the background at least as much as changing what its users actually see.

“The biggest change is how you deliver. Working in empowered, multidisciplinary teams. Starting with the needs of users. Publishing your work in the open. Iteratively improving what you do. Testing new services with real people. Using tools of the open internet over expensive proprietary options. Writing clearly for a wide audience. Showing prototypes and working code as a substitute for papers and meetings. Building trust between people in your organisation, and those who it works with. Designing with data. Doing the hard work to make things simple.”

In 2013, GDS had 200 employees. Today, there are more than 850 managing delivery, guidance, marketplace and multiple platforms and products. It has inspired much of the digital government organization landscape, and Digital Transformation at Scale is the playbook for anyone — from elected officials to government administrators — sincerely interested in reforming how government serves the people.

While I went so far as to create brand elements, social media accounts, project management and strategic documentation on this, I just haven’t found the time or energy to execute in a way that would do it justice.

Normally, with ideas that I prototype and don’t act on, I delete and move on, archiving them as just another experiment in learning and creative processing. For some reason, I think this one has the potential to impact the conversation around government change in a creative, interesting format.

California is on the cusp of ushering in a new era of government digital services, one that our elected leaders can finally align, prioritize and execute on, and prove to the people of the Golden State that our representatives are ready to innovate just as other industries here have done.

The future of the digital government services we deserve is in the hands of Governor Gavin Newsom and the California state legislature, who now must work together and execute on a holistic, forward-thinking plan, with both having a strong understanding and commitment to what this means, so that there’s little confusion as to how it will work.

Newsom himself authored a book focused on digital public service and the scalable, impactful power of civic technology. He has championed modern technologies — from open standards to software-as-a-service — throughout his political career. We have a California governor that gets digital and technology better than anyone previous, and perhaps more so than any other governor in the United States.

This, coupled with the legislature’s understandable frustrations with recurring, failed, billion dollar technology projects — and many poorly-executed million dollar ones — offers the perfect storm to propel us towards the digital change we need.

Newsom has proposed a new Office of Digital Innovation as part of the state’s 2019-20 budget, with initial start-up costs of $36.2 million and 50 positions.

When the official budget is approved in June, we’ll know better what type of commitment will be made to this effort and how far forward-thinking California — a state that prides itself on technology innovation — will “think different.”

This first $36 million is the seed money we need to create the scalable digital revolution that will change California government services for the better, forever

Distinguishing digital

There is typically confusion as to the difference between digital and technology. While digital leverages technology, digital is not purely a technology function. Digital is a scalable, sustainable approach to serving people online.

Government technology departments at their core should focus on setting a directive that provides governance and guidelines to all agencies. They also should procure and manage general, multi-use software and platforms at licenses and costs that financially benefit the state. Their core function ensures there is an exponential approach to how the state is leveraging technology, be it bespoke, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) or a combination of both.

While an important one, technology is just one component of digital government service delivery.

It’s important for government leaders — particularly elected officials responsible for budget allocation — to distinguish between digital and technology, so as to not confuse past IT failures and building a future digital government strategy. Our government leaders must understand that the former has often occurred because the lack of the latter.

These technologies have grown in usage because of an open, exponential mindset, the same one the government of today must have. As do technology entrepreneurs, our public sector leaders must ask this question when thinking exponential government:

“How do we serve the most people as efficiently and effectively and resourcefully as possible?”

Incremental government service delivery is the status quo approach responsible for government technology failures in California and globally. Rooted in a lack of standards or a technology directive that provides guidance as to how all systems should operate.

California government leaders must “think exponential,” enforcing standards and guidance rooted in open and platform-based standards and technologies that empower state public servants to do their jobs the way they intend.

Exponential questions California state leaders should ask about every digital or technology initiative:

How does it build a more unified, elegant experience for the people of California?

How does this scale to other agencies?

How will it save money for the state of California?

Example digital

The United Kingdom’s Government Digital Service was founded in 2011. By 2013, it had 200 employees. Today, it has more than 850, all managing delivery, guidance, a marketplace and multiple platforms and products that uniformly serve the people of UK.

Its genesis came from a 2010 report, Directgov 2010 and beyond: revolution not evolution, that advocated for bold recommendations, including a unified digital presence, a designated team with “absolute control of the overall user experience across all digital channels, commissioning all government online information from other departments.”

It also recommended a “CEO for Digital … absolute authority over the user experience across all government online services (websites and APls) and the power to direct all government online spending.”

It has become the blueprint for how governments can elegantly and exponentially execute digital services holistically and sustainably. It has brought respect and pride to the work of public service not just in the UK, but globally.

The GDS birth and evolution, including lessons-learned and recommendations for how to build a government digital service elsewhere, are well-documented in Digital Transformation at Scale, written by four of its founders and former executive, design and technology leaders. It is a must-read for every public service employee anywhere.

Mandatory digital

Exponential digital will require aspirational and bold leadership from Governor Newsom and the California legislature, some that may not be popular to status quo thinkers. Following successful digital execution in the UK, California should learn from this and make these tough choices for the sake of the people and the future of state public service.

Pause ‘innovation’

The word ‘innovation’ and general concept evoke a sentiment that those involved with it will not be focused on meaningful, concrete deliverables. The proposed Office of Digital Innovation should be renamed to emphasize actual service delivery and not transcendental technology endeavors that do not involve solving real problems right now. This new organization needs to be taken seriously from the start, and naming it based on function is as important for optics as it is for internal focus.

The proposed organization should be named Digital California, California Digital Services, or something similar that indicates deliverables at scale is its primary focus.

Appoint an empowered chief digital officer (and internet-era CTO)

Digital California needs a senior-level executive that holds rank with other cabinet officials and has a mandate to lead comprehensive digital services into the future. If this person is third-tier on the organizational chart, Digital California won’t have the political, financial or administrative authority to effectively execute and will potentially devolve into an incremental organization.

The time has also come for an internet-era chief technology officer that either works within Digital California or as the chief executive of the California Department of Technology. California must have a leader with bonafide IT experience and proven leadership understanding deeply and deploying technology on multiple fronts to establish a proactive technology directive, as well as better vet current projects.

Move to single domain

Just as California has currently, prior to GDS, the UK government had multiple websites under multiple domains (some outside of the official government .gov one) with varying aesthetics, functionality and accessibility, security and/or mobility adherence. As it now does in California, this caused duplicate development efforts, inconsistent user experiences and a general focus on the organization or agency, rather than how the end user expects to experience a government service.

To address this issue, as the UK did with GOV.UK, California must move all web operations to its primary domain, ca.gov, and begin consolidating all websites and transactions into a “One California” user experience. The single domain approach must include a service manual, design principles, service standard and digital strategy, aligning digital direction forward, much like the technology directive will for IT.

Publish a technology directive

In collaboration with Digital California, the California Department of Technology must develop a technology directive that outlines standards, governance and guidelines for implementing and managing technology used by the state.

California has yet to deliver proactive technology leadership such as Canada’s, and it’s imperative going forward that it does. Having a coherent, holistic framework for how the state procures and manages its relationship with technology — whether bespoke or through third-party software and platform services — is a requisite for the health of future California IT projects and digital delivery.

Implement spending controls

California should never again have to experience billion dollar IT failures. As the UK government did, there must be spending controls that limit the lifetime value of an IT contract. In the UK’s case, it was $100 million.

“Any large organization with growing IT costs needs to recognise that it is running against market trends; the cost of established technology is falling, and the last thing an organization needs is to buy even more of it. If you want the same outcomes for your business, your IT should get cheaper. If you want outcomes that improve at the same rate as technology evolves, the costs should stay broadly the same. And if you want to be at the bleeding edge, you should make very sure you are making a wise investment.”

Run assessments

Digital California should establish an assessment team to determine whether projects should be dissolved before they turn into epic failures. Based on objective standards and knowledge of delivery and technology, this team should be empowered to shutter any project that isn’t meeting its intended service objective.

“Those responsible for making decisions over the wisdom of a technology investment or digital service should be people who deeply understand technology or who have built digital services. This sounds obvious, but is often not the case. Rather than clever generalists looking at forms, appraisals and assessments were led by multidisciplinary panels of specialists experts unafraid of putting a few noses out of joint, not generalists with one eye on their career.”

Measure and publish progress

Digital California must continuously be open about its progress, from delivery status to fiscal impact. There should be reporting that highlights, in the context of digital, how it’s answering the three questions posed earlier:

How is it building a more unified, elegant experience for the people of California?

In its 2012 report, GDS estimated it would save “between £1.7 billion and £1.8 billion could be realised as total annual savings to the government and service users.” In 2017, USDS reported to Congress that “over a 5-year period, we project our current projects will save $617 million and redirect 1,475 labor years toward higher-value work.”

Digital California should provide both a performance dashboard and annual report, in context of deliverables and financial savings, so that progress can be regularly monitored, shared and celebrated. This will ensure there is ongoing insight into progress and less of a potential for failure in the context we’ve seen in the past.

As we’ve seen with GDS and USDS, California’s potential for financial savings alone is exponential. A deeper dive into UK’s performance dashboard shows equal opportunity for delivering and scaling public digital services.

Onwards digital

California Senator Kamala Harris raised the bar on digital leadership last week, proposing the Digital Service Act that would allocate increased funding and support to USDS and state and local governments.

“We must do more to empower our state and local governments to tap into the power of technology to provide seamless, cost-effective services for the 21st century,” said Harris. “The Digital Service Act will help harness top talent for the government, save taxpayer dollars, and put the power of technology to work on behalf of the American people.”

As the largest state in America with the fifth largest economy in the world (larger than UK), California must take the opportunity it has before us and execute a bold approach by making a GDS-like investment in its digital future. For elected officials who represent innovative constituents and organizations across many industries, doing the same for government is a no-brainer.

“One of the biggest recommendations from the digital services team in Mexico was connecting the digital services program to big, bold, public goals. It can be tempting for new digital teams to keep a low profile as they build relationships and notch small internal victories. But the strength of the organization and its sustainability in the long term will partially depend on its ability to create excitement and political wins. Make digital transformation aspirational, not just a collection of workaday best practices, and you can capture the imagination of public servants as well as citizens.”

“When Estonia started building our information society about two decades ago, there was no digital data being collected about our citizens. The general population did not have the internet or even devices with which to use it. It took great courage to invest in IT solutions and take the information technology route.”

As our governor and legislature work to determine the future of the California public services, its people are counting on high aspirations and great courage to lead them into the digital future.

]]>https://govfresh.com/2019/03/golden-state-dot-gov/feed/024562Part 2: Re-imagining the California DMV websitehttps://govfresh.com/2019/03/part-2-re-imagining-the-california-dmv-website/
https://govfresh.com/2019/03/part-2-re-imagining-the-california-dmv-website/#respondFri, 01 Mar 2019 17:48:50 +0000https://govfresh.com/?p=24540It’s been a week since I published my thoughts on re-imagining the California Department of Motor Vehicles website. During that time, the issues I had with not receiving my REAL ID were resolved and the process inspired me to think and prototype a little more on the first iteration.

My personal user experience

Through the entire process — experiencing mail, field office, online, phone (with three different departments) and social media interactions — I’ve gained a more holistic insight into how others most likely interact with DMV.

General observations:

Phone: My interactions with all three operators were pleasant and succinct. The hold times were long. The practice of informing callers that all operators are busy and to call back at a later time is a customer support fail. The auto call-back feature used by the main line is something that should be incorporated across all departments.

Social: I was pleasantly surprised by the Twitter follow-up and, in hindsight, I wish I would have pursued this route just to see how effective the support there is.

Prototype update

I made some minor updates to the prototype, including the homepage, beta bar and initial concept for a tertiary page.

Homepage

I made the call-to-action links more app/kiosk-like. As mentioned in my previous post, this aesthetic would force a more pithy approach on the content front.

Beta bar

I added a ‘beta bar’ explaining to users that this is a prototype with a link to details as well as the official DMV website. It’s ubiquitous without causing too much aesthetic distraction.

Tertiary page

A new tertiary page mock-up includes an accordion approach to content, allowing for a larger amount of content to be included on a page without causing it to be overwhelming or having more additional pages thanneccessary.

I created an issue to consolidate REAL ID content from the official DMV website onto this page at a future date. This will serve as an example of how content on the current site can be better consolidated and presented, as there are several documents and pages that could easily merge into just one.

DMV digital innovation ideas

Go beta

Having a public beta that starts small, iterates based on user activity, research and feedback, is now the status quo, and is the safest approach to launching a new website, particularly one with large-scale reach.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs did this with va.gov. Previously, va.gov was the flagship website for VA, and vets.gov became a public beta, leveraging an open and agile approach to development. Vets.gov is now VA’s flagship website.

If VA, one of the largest federal government agencies can do this, so can California DMV.

Open the data

California DMV provides some data around offline user experience in the form of wait times. While it’s not in an extensible format, it is interesting and helpful, and the fact that the agency is publishing any is encouraging.

Having access to website traffic would be incredibly insightful in helping to conceptualize more on the prototype.

DMV could easily do this through a tool like Google Data Studio. This would take a few hours to stand up and provideto make a public dashboard of this information. Some examples of using Data Studio to display Google Analytics are here, here, here and here.

An alternative would be to publish this information, and the wait time data, in open formats at data.ca.gov.

Code DMV

It would be inspiring to see the state host an open space, civic-focused Code DMV event that incorporated user testing and rapid prototyping to help build a beta DMV website.

An event like this would go a long way in showing that DMV is embracing a culture of open, proactively working with the community to re-imagine how it can better serve the residents of California. It would also align with the state’s new Code California initiative, “an open collaboration between agencies, industry technology partners and civic technologists working to code a more innovative, collaborative and effective government that best serves the people of California.”

Collaborate

If you have ideas or want to build on the prototype, add your issues or comments in the GitHub repository or fork it and contribute back.

I recently visited my local California Department of Motor Vehicles field office to renew my driver license and, because I scheduled an appointment ahead of time, my experience wasn’t the nightmare it’s traditionally made out to be.

However, the designer in me couldn’t help but think about how the entire DMV process could be re-designed, both offline and online.

I’m still waiting to receive my new REAL ID license, so I went to the DMV website to learn how I could find the status. While there, I realized there is a huge opportunity to re-imagine its user experience, so I spent a few hours designing a prototype.

Goals

The key goals of DMV digital should be to:

Increase website traffic where users can self-serve

Increase kiosk traffic where users can self-serve

Decrease field office visits (because of the successful implementation of the above two bullets)

Campaign

I came up with an “Online. Not in line.” slogan, which I incorporated into the homepage to better help socialize the web and kiosks options.

There’s significant creative opportunities around a campaign like this to drive people to self-service or be more proactive using the website and kiosks to be better prepared before making a field office visit.

Analysis

Without getting too detailed in a critique of the current DMV website, there are two areas that should be of primary focus:

Content: The content should be significantly consolidated, edited and made more concise. Much of it is redundant, wordy and extraneous.

User interface: The aesthetic is clearly dated, but the use of graphics in certain instances is unnecessary. A clean, simple text-based approach with a more app/kiosk feel would make the experience feel less intimidating and cumbersome.

What I did

I created prototypes of the home and secondary pages, focusing on simplicity and an app/kiosk user interface.

Thank you

I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who works at DMV, especially those of you on the front lines in the field offices.

Decades of bureaucracy coupled with the reach and role the agency has on every Californian has created a Herculean, thankless challenge for everyone who works there. While we all know it could be made better, you’re the ones in the trenches.

As a proud California resident, I hope you challenge status quo thinking and re-imagine how DMV can be re-designed — offline and online — and become a positive conduit for state pride — internally and externally — and for how public service should work.

If government truly wants to transform digital services and effectively serve the public at scale, it must start with how it attracts and retains top technology talent.

For generations, the government typically recruited people for their entire working career, just like any other large corporation. Times have changed. Now, no-one expects a job for life. Companies have changed how they recruit to handle this new economic reality. However, government doesn’t do much recruiting, and its convoluted hiring process discourages many, particularly in-demand digital designers and technologists, whose skills are highly-leveraged and well-compensated for.

Typically with government, a job opening is created — usually with dated skills requirements and classifications — then posted to a random location on a website or, at best, a privately-run one focused specifically on government job seekers.

The federal government consolidates its job openings on USAJOBS, which has improved greatly since its past troubles, but technologists — unless you’re a career bureaucrat or have nowhere else to leverage your COBOL skills — are less likely to use this as a channel for seeking employment.

More than one person I spoke with for this post used the word “calcified” to describe the government’s approach to hiring and recruiting.

A 2017 NextGov analysis of U.S. Office of Personnel Management federal workforce data shows a concerning trend with respect to technologists. According to the report, the federal government “employed roughly 1.8 IT workers age 60 or older for every IT employee under 30 years old in 2007, but that ratio more than doubled over the next 10 years, widening to 4.5 IT specialists age 60-plus per employee under 30 by 2017.”

As older government employees begin to retire, the public sector will have to escalate and re-imagine its recruiting efforts, as well as streamline hiring in order to fill the ensuing gaping void. On top of all this, it will still have to compete with the private sector’s increasing demand — and lower barrier to employment — for high-tech labor.

“In order to address this problem, the government must prioritize recruiting and hiring senior leaders and employees with modern technical experience and know-how—experts who can prevent systemic failures, fix broken services, launch new digital initiatives and capitalize on emerging technologies.”

In researching and speaking with people who have served or are currently serving on, and in some cases have served on multiple digital teams, key themes emerged:

Start at the top

Prioritize diversity

Build the talent team

Define the skills

Create options

Form the pitch

Be transparent about the process

Promote the culture and people

Recruit outside the box

Hire for EQ

Measure and optimize

Empower existent staff

Modernize the bureaucracy

Start at the top

The time has come for the C-suite to genuinely know what it’s doing with respect to digital strategy.

We can no longer afford to rely on senior-level government leaders who know how to effectively use IT buzzwords and position themselves publicly as innovators, only to witness their ineffectiveness in private. If agency leaders, chief information officers and chief technology officers only bring to the table administrative or myopic IT experience , they will continue to be the ultimate blockers to successful project delivery. These positions must be filled with qualified people who have hands-on experience, can direct strategy and can call bullshit when they see it.

This need also applies to other administrative functions of government, such as human resources, legal, procurement, that factor into the success of digital implementation.

“Agency chief information officers should be highly skilled technological managers who can successfully handle existing technical operations, infrastructure and services. They should be able to work effectively with leaders across the organization to modernize service delivery and the approach to buying and implementing technology infrastructure. Crucially, they also should be able to alter the expectations of government digital services. … Optimal candidates will have led organizational migrations from old systems to modern ones and have a track record of collaborating successfully with operations, product and engineering leaders to support the delivery of digital services. … Ultimately, the goal is to raise the bar for what is expected of senior executives, and this starts by hiring people who know what is possible.”

More and more, the digital adeptness of senior government leaders, particularly appointed ones, will be a strong reflection of the savviness of those issuing these appointments.

Prioritize diversity

“One of the core values underpinning the work of [UK] GDS is to ‘reflect the society we serve’,” writes UK GDS Director General Kevin Cunningham on the GDS blog. “We aim to help government work better for everyone and will only achieve this if our organisation is as diverse as the society we serve.”

A strong emphasis on team diversity, particularly with the scale digital has on reach, must be explicit, authentic and public. Examples of this include GDS’ minority-focused internal networks, hiring protocol and appointment of a diversity and inclusion manager, 18F’s Diversity Guild, and public, emphatic blog posts such as Cunningham’s and USDS’ “USDS + Lesbians Who Tech.”

These efforts aren’t without merit. According to a November 2018 USDS diversity report, 28 percent of the team was minority, “and striving to increase that,” with 44 percent self‑identifying as female, including 61.5 percent of the leadership.

“It’s critical to build a digital services team that reflects the diversity of the population it serves. Teams that do can leverage broader perspectives and experiences in design processes. They will be far better-equipped to focus on and identify user needs. They will have more credibility with the public service and the public. While hiring standards for this kind of diversity can created a challenge, the best digital services teams practice what they preach.”

Build the talent team

With the goal of identifying how to effectively hire high-quality people quickly, in-house talent teams are a requisite for recruiting and hiring at the genesis of new digital service organizations. The amount of energy and resources needed to proactively find and onboard diverse, top-level talent is beyond the scope of traditional government HR teams, and this cannot be left to an external department with little to no cultural ties to the primary organization.

Having said that, digital talent teams also should be the conduit for educating human resource departments — often wedded to traditional, stringent protocol — on the unique hiring needs and goals of the digital teams and working closely with them to ensure they’re aligned with their agile ethos.

“The Digital Services found that the best way to do this was to create their own talent teams to manage the recruiting and hiring process in-house, meet all compliance requirements including veterans’ preference and coordinate with agency HR teams when necessary, rather than rely on HR to manage the whole process. The teams are intimately familiar with effective industry practices, prioritize active recruiting, provide an excellent candidate experience and lead a rigorous selection process based on technical evaluation by subject matter experts.”

As former USDS team member John O’Duinn said, “The recruitment team could speak the languages of government HR and private sector HR fluently. Knowing what was ‘normal’ for private industry, helped them set candidate expectations, even for silently assumed topics. Just as importantly, they could work well inside government to help track and speed up the hiring process wheels whenever needed.”

Define the skills

Digital service teams require a new set of skills and roles, and these must be effectively outlined and described in today’s language rather than in the outdated or non-existent traditional government classifications and descriptions.

Note: I intend to address deeper nuances of digital delivery team make-up — skills and roles — in a future post.

Create options

The reality of some teams, particularly in their infancy, is that digital service organizations will need to get creative with enticing technical expertise.

Leveraging creative ways within the civil service structure, particularly for shorter term commitments that align with the length of the project, is a way to bring in new faces and expose them to the work with the hopes they stay but, at minimum become another vocal, public champion for the cause.

Form the pitch

The downsides of applying for and working in tech-related government jobs are obvious: cumbersome hiring process, less pay, general negative perception of government and technology challenges are less cutting edge.

But the upside of a government job appeal to those who yearn for work with a greater purpose, strong sense of service and camaraderie of those doing the same.

The impact technologists can have internally and externally is exponential. Very few places can you work and make decisions that have an impact on many, and often in your own community. Technologists looking for a challenge and chance to leverage their multifaceted digital talent, especially given that government work requires this, will be hard-pressed to find a better opportunity.

“Digital services teams shouldn’t underestimate their power to recruit—because finding qualified people for transformative public services isn’t a competition on salary or title, but on impact and mission. Recruitment rests on an appeal to a sense of duty, a desire to make the world better, and an opportunity to achieve change at scale.”

Service is the fundamental pitch, and digital teams must lead and emphasize this every chance it gets.

“My pitch is also honest: this work will be hard,” says San Rafael (Calif.) Director of Digital Service and Open Government Rebecca Woodbury. “You will get frustrated. but it’s worth it, because you are making things better. We are building a great team. If you want to be a cog in a well-oiled machine, this is not the job for you, but if you want to fix things and enjoy a challenge – you will love it here.”

Be transparent about the process

Government employment hiring is cumbersome and anyone would be exasperated by the process. It’s important for digital service teams to expose this so that, when knowing what to expect, there’s less room for uncertainty and anxiety that goes with a job search. Set the expectations so there’s less of this.

This includes the interview process, pay, benefits, offer and onboarding.

For interviews, it’s important to include subject matter experts. The 18F Core Values interview guide is a comprehensive resource for better vetting the technical skills of applicants, and incorporating technologists into interviews adds depth to the filtering and help HR understand needs beyond checking qualification boxes.

Former USDS team member Jeff Maher also recommends training for skills-specific interviewees so they are more adept at interviewing. Talent teams should train them “to be good interviewers that know how to ask questions that dig deep and improve their ability to recognize implicit bias.”

“This risk of not doing this is that even if all the others things come together, the wrong people get hired because the interviews were bad, and bad or poor-fit humans make for ineffective service delivery,” says Maher.

Promote the culture and people

Getting proactive with outreach shows the people and process involved in delivery and humanizes the institution of government. Essentially, you’re building trust with prospects — and the public — that your organization truly cares about the mission, is competent and a great place to work.

Recruit outside the box

Typically governments “post and pray,” as Anastasoff told me, when looking to fill job openings, and there’s not much of an effort beyond this to proactively seek top talent.

Digital service teams must leverage personal networks, civic technology focused events, design and coding meetups, political technology organizations and speaking and boothing at conferences to get the word out. While doing this, they must be mindful to be diverse in their efforts, so as to not create monocultures. This means nurturing diverse personal networks that trust you, long before you post your job opening.

And, as Anastasoff told me, at USDS “it was everyone’s job to recruit.”

Hire for EQ

Of course, it’s important to hire for TQ (technology IQ), but EQ (or emotional intelligence) is critical for digital service teams, especially when working in stagnant or toxic cultures, time-sensitive or failing projects, some that may be high-profile disasters.

The last thing you want on a project, particularly one with high stakes and emotions, is an arrogant technologist parachuting into a project, who thinks they are smarter than everyone else and can’t quickly foster trust with the team who happen to be the world’s leading experts in that specific existing domain, existing technology and hidden gotchas after years of hard-learned experience.

As John O’Duinn told me, “That rarely ends well.”

For high stakes projects, people need to quickly trust each other’s technical competence as well as their ability to work well with others in times of stress. Members of these teams, and leadership, must commit to emotional intelligence — empathy, humility, patience, sense of community — and value these traits as much as they do for TQ.

In talking with Anastasoff, she emphasized the importance of recruiting and hiring metrics and continuously honing in on what’s working and what’s not, including assessing how the process works, how long things take, where the blockers are, and then fixing them.

As a result of its diligence, the USDS talent team was able to lower the average number of business days from application to offer from 152 (2015 Q1) to 34 (2017 Q2).

If the federal government can optimize for talent onboarding, anyone can.

Empower existing staff

One of the challenges with digital service projects is the support time stamp, such as the way USDS works with agencies. With the exception of longer-term commitments, like Defense Digital Service or Digital Service at VA, there is a set window of onboarding, delivery, handoff, and then on to the next project. Helping to build internal capacity and maintain continuity is critical.

As Sasha Magee, former 18Fer and now technical director for San Francisco Digital Services told me, digital service teams “can’t be big enough to impact an impact by themselves.”

While some can’t stay long-term due to the nature of delivery projects, or won’t, because they’ve committed to time-limited tours of duty, others will, and they may be there for a long time. The long-term success of digital depends on how prepared and bought in those who stay retain the skills and culture needed to sustain and thrive.

Creative recruiting and hiring will help, but in order for digital success to scale, there must be a focus on upgrading current staff — introducing new tools, communities of practice, training, handbooks — but also, just as important, helping them grok and adopt the culture of digital.

Ultimately, the onus is on these people to re-invent their cultures, operations and themselves, build digital teams of their own, educate and push leadership to evolve and adapt, and positively contribute to the future of public service leadership.

Modernize the bureaucracy

Some governments, such as California, are starting to come to terms with these lackluster hiring processes, and the increasingly critical impact they have on effectively recruiting and retaining qualified people.

In January 2018, California consolidated 36 information technology job classifications into nine new ones. The state also reclassified data-related skills late last year.

“Information technology is a dynamic, constantly changing field,” said Government Operations Agency Secretary Marybel Batjer at the time. “This class consolidation plan gives the state modern descriptions and the structure needed to recruit and retain skilled information technology employees.”

“An improved civil service system will produce a capable and engaged state workforce that is able to adapt to new challenges in serving the people of California and will reflect the diversity of the population it serves,.”

Engaging employees and promote work-life balance for more productive employees

Compensation:

Thorough evaluation of full compensation and salary scale compaction issues

Addressing executive compensation gap with local government and related retention and recruitment issues

If meaningful civil service reform is to happen, it will be on a policy front that proactively addresses compensation, job descriptions and the bureaucratic categories under which they reside. Essentially, what’s needed is a global movement for a “Digital Government Jobs Modernization Act” at all levels of government.

Much sooner than later, political, bureaucratic government and union leaders everywhere should look to California’s efforts to address this in their own jurisdictions. If they are truly committed to modernizing today’s workforce, recruiting the next generation of technology innovators and effectively serving the public, they must get proactive.

Future of government work

Some argue governments must think more different, from distributed teams, pooled resources, and expanded use of microconsulting.

Distributed, remote work, especially in areas where resiliency planning and geographic representation should be baked into culture and operations. 18F, with its flexible telework and virtual worker policy, was able to attract people from all across the United States by stretching beyond the borders of a physical office space. John O’Duinn, formerly of USDS, wrote the book “Distributed Teams: The Art and Practice of Working Together While Physically Apart,” focused on the improved hiring, retention, disaster resilience and other organizational benefits of this growing trend.

And while the move to hire full-scale, internal teams is the trend, microconsulting, could be a more agile, affordable, sustainable solution, especially for smaller, local governments and short-term projects.

Perhaps, as e.Republic Chief Innovation Officer Dustin Haisler writes, “your best employees won’t work for you in the future.” After the social contract changed, and with the current generational workforce change, most private companies and most employees already work with a “no more job for life” mindset.

Apply today

For the designers, developers, project managers and product owners wanting to exponentially impact the world, there has never been a better time to leverage your expertise to change how public sector institutions — large and small — serve our communities.

It won’t be easy, but it will positively impact more people than you may imagine, including yourself.

]]>https://govfresh.com/2019/02/we-want-you-recruiting-and-hiring-for-government-digital-services/feed/024511For and with the people: An introduction to government digital servicehttps://govfresh.com/2019/01/for-and-with-the-people-an-introduction-to-government-digital-service/
https://govfresh.com/2019/01/for-and-with-the-people-an-introduction-to-government-digital-service/#respondTue, 29 Jan 2019 19:20:34 +0000https://govfresh.com/?p=24493Photo: UK Government Digital Service

As the general public increasingly expects the civic user experience to be as refined as the ones we have with our consumer electronics, digital service delivery has become a priority for governments locally and globally.

This growing demand has ushered in an era of government digital service teams, focused specifically on delivering a better online experience and, as the UK Government Digital Service says, “help government work better for everyone.”

As more governments at every level adopt some form of service delivery with an emphasis on improving the digital experience, it’s helpful to understand the context, history and evolution of some of these, so that future instances can better start and scale with more efficiency and effectiveness than their predecessors.

Defining delivery

While these organizations vary in scope and approach, the overarching objectives are similar. Each is keenly focused on enhancing the public’s online experience with government.

“The term ‘digital government’ is not a buzzword for flashy new government websites, apps or the end of paperwork. Rather than an exclusively technological transformation, ‘digital government’ presents an opportunity for a cultural and operational shift that is much more than the digitization of government services. It is about cultivating an environment that prioritizes citizens and promotes streamlined, secure service delivery supported by technology. It is about reimagining the service relationship with citizens to remain relevant. To do this, government must build an innovative and agile public service, with modern governance structures that correspond to the new digital landscape.”

Some of these organizations strategically and smartly extend beyond reactive work or proactive service-specific work and invest in deeper resources to address more mundane bureaucratic issues, including streamlining procurement and approval processes, improving recruitment and hiring, streamlining backend processes, incorporating technology open standards, and helping to adopt product management practices. The ones that are empowered to holistically address these issues as a unit are emerging as more unified, scaling their momentum and impact beyond just the standard strategy of tacking on an unenforceable innovation role to the IT department. Of note is that none of the successful ones have emerged from pure technology organizations.

Here’s a survey of how some pitch their offerings.

UK Government Digital Service:

“We help government work better for everyone by leading digital transformation … We help people interact with government and support government to operate more effectively and efficiently.”

18F:

“18F partners with agencies to improve the user experience of government. … We help other government agencies build, buy, and share technology products.”

U.S. Digital Service:

“The United States Digital Service is a startup at The White House, using design and technology to deliver better services to the American people. … We partner leading technologists with dedicated public servants to improve the usability and reliability of our government’s most important digital services.”

San Francisco Digital Services:

“San Francisco Digital Services works with other City departments to improve public services. We use technology to make it easier for people to get things done. … We’re re-thinking how public services are designed, by understanding what our users need and building with an agile approach.”

New South Wales:

“Helping you deliver great government services. … Find the building blocks for creating user-centred digital services, as well as policy, tools and guidance.”

And the most elegant overview from Canadian Digital Service:

“We are focused on delivery: helping government design and build better services.”

The universal government services mantra is simple:

provide better online user experiences

leverage modern technologies

deploy iterative project management practices

fix procurement

recruit and hire great people

History, modus operandi

Each of these delivery teams have emerged from different contexts, creating less of an evolved path to a service delivery panacea, but ones that represent the respective leadership, politics, priorities and events of their respective times.

Since its 2011 founding, the UK GDS has served as the inspiration for all service teams that have launched since.

Its genesis came from a 2010 report, “Directgov 2010 and beyond: revolution not evolution,” that advocated for bold recommendations, including a unified digital presence, a designated team with “absolute control of the overall user experience across all digital channels, commissioning all government online information from other departments,” and a “CEO for Digital” in the Cabinet Office with “absolute authority over the user experience across all government online services (websites and APls) and the power to direct all government online spending.”

In 2013, GDS had 200 employees. Today, it has more than 850 managing delivery, guidance, a marketplace and multiple platforms and products. It has become the blueprint for how government can elegantly execute digital services holistically and sustainably.

In true startup fashion, 18F experimented over time with its value offering, from delivery to consulting, ultimately moving towards the latter, particularly related to procuring digital services.

A key difference with 18F than other digital teams is that its directive is self-sufficiency, which it has yet to achieve. As 18F states on its website, “We are cost-recoverable, which means we don’t receive appropriated funds from Congress and must charge partner agencies for our work.”

18F has provided significant leadership and long-term impact, executing its vision through evergreen work, including comprehensive guides, design standards, open source advocacy and a public operations handbook. This foundational work, which doesn’t get the full credit it deserves, has allowed for exponential momentum around agile, open source, procurement modernization, web best practices to scale and expedite within the federal government, but also beyond.

Today, it is integrated into the U.S. General Service Administration’s Technology Transformation Service, losing some of its startup personality and distinguishable brand, but still provides impactful work to the broader U.S. federal government ecosystem. 18F currently has approximately 120 employees.

Subsequently, several 18F alumni now lead digital service teams elsewhere, including Aaron Snow as CEO of the Canadian Digital Service, and Hillary Hartley as chief digital officer for Ontario province.

The Obama White House established the U.S. Digital Service in August 2014 in response to the mishandled 2013 Healthcare.gov launch. Much of its early work was highly reactive, supporting troubled federal government technology projects.

It now provides more proactive delivery support, but also helps build agency-specific digital teams across the federal government. Like 18F, it has provided some evergreen resources, including the Digital Services Playbook, innovative technology procurement guidance and a fresh approach to brand, culture, recruitment and hiring, but its primary focus is delivery.

USDS currently has approximately 165 members working across federal agencies, including the Departments of Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, Defense, Education, Health and Human Services, and the Small Business Administration.

While both 18F and USDS have complementary offerings and collaborate at times, the lack of a unified purpose and brand or universal mandate and authority differentiates the United States federal government’s approach than that of UK’s, and even most other digital service teams.

Many other state and local governments are incrementally starting and building their own digital-focused organizations, navigating challenges such as leadership, funding, resources, internal bureaucratic skepticism and complacency and individual egos.

Because none of these organizations will emerge in a vacuum, they will all have different geneses and evolutions.

“We don’t believe there will be just one model that will work everywhere and at all times — and we fully recognize that the real value units provide isn’t checking boxes on a model, but rather delivering value to citizens.”

Vendor 2.0

Working behind the scenes supporting these efforts is an emerging ecosystem of small vendors focused specifically on public sector digital — CivicActions, Nava, AdHoc, FutureGov, Public Digital and others (disclosure: I have a financial relationship with the former) — many formed and led by early alumni of these government service teams.

Incidentally, Carrie Bishop is a co-founder of FutureGov, the pioneer of boutique digital government services firms, and is now chief digital services officer of SFDS. Also, Mike Bracken, former head of UK GDS is now a partner at Public Digital.

These new vendors, entirely comfortable and adept at working in delivery-driven and open source environments, fully embrace and advocate new procurement experiments and reform efforts.

The Digital Services Coalition, a cooperative of these companies, formed in 2018 to adopt a collaborative, co-opetition culture and model of working with one another to get and grow government business.

As stated in its mission:

“Government missions can profoundly benefit society and individuals. Government digital services transformation has the potential to expand, even multiply, these benefits and provide substantial efficiency gains. The existing contractor ecosystem is ill suited to forward the above. Nimble, forward-leaning, small firms are the ones who can make this a reality. More of the ‘right kind’ of companies and people need to serve the government space. By working together, we can accelerate this larger trend, and bring more value to the government more quickly, all while benefiting the individuals and firms that are part of the community.”

Their faces and logos are invisible to the general public, but these new private sector companies, with their aligned open and agile ethos, are critical to the success of the future of digital government service.

As innovative procurement leaders continue to adopt ways of lowering the barrier to entry and access, we will see increased market share from these companies and even more small businesses entering the government service delivery vendor pool.

Aspirational digital

After gaining independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, its sovereignty and bureaucratic clean slate coincided with a new wave of web innovation and set a strong foundation for digital government leapfrogging.

“Today, citizens can vote from their laptops and challenge parking tickets from home. They do so through the “once only” policy, which dictates that no single piece of information should be entered twice. Instead of having to “prepare” a loan application, applicants have their data—income, debt, savings—pulled from elsewhere in the system. There’s nothing to fill out in doctors’ waiting rooms, because physicians can access their patients’ medical histories. Estonia’s system is keyed to a chip-I.D. card that reduces typically onerous, integrative processes—such as doing taxes—to quick work. “If a couple in love would like to marry, they still have to visit the government location and express their will,” Andrus Kaarelson, a director at the Estonian Information Systems Authority, says. But, apart from transfers of physical property, such as buying a house, all bureaucratic processes can be done online.”

While Estonia is an anomaly in its origins, one that many governments would appreciate the luxury of, it’s still the digital vision others should aspire to and be inspired by.

One aspect of Estonia to watch is whether it will continue to sustain its innovative momentum or will the clean slate eventually succumb to bureaucratic digital stagnancy over time.

The courage to think bigger

All of these efforts are having an impact, but there is a need for political and administrative government leadership to think different and bigger on digital and push for a more exponential approach that meets, and exceeds, the public’s increased expectations.

California is the latest entrant to venture seriously into government digital services. In January 2019, Governor Gavin Newsom proposed a new California Office of Digital Innovation with a startup budget of $36 million and 50 employees. When the official budget is approved this June, we’ll have a better understanding of what resources will be provided to this effort, and how big California, a state that prides itself on technology innovation, will go.

If there’s anyone who can lead with a bold, holistic vision similar to what UK (and Estonia) has done, it’s Newsom, especially given his electoral mandate, established political connections, and positioning as a digital government enabler and champion. For an innovator-branded politician like Newsom, now head of the largest state in America with the fifth largest economy in the world, California can be bold in its approach, eventually make a GDS-like investment in its digital future and show others what can truly be accomplished on this front.

There has been no better opportunity to show the rest of the world, including the U.S. federal government, how a truly effective digital strategy can positively impact the lives of many.

Outside of the UK and Estonia, these efforts are inspiring and true signs of progress, but the next wave of government service delivery evolution needs bold and innovative leadership from politicians and public sector administrators leaders unafraid to take the digital moonshot.

“One of the biggest recommendations from the digital services team in Mexico was connecting the digital services program to big, bold, public goals. It can be tempting for new digital teams to keep a low profile as they build relationships and notch small internal victories. But the strength of the organization and its sustainability in the long term will partially depend on its ability to create excitement and political wins. Make digital transformation aspirational, not just a collection of workaday best practices, and you can capture the imagination of public servants as well as citizens.”

“When Estonia started building our information society about two decades ago, there was no digital data being collected about our citizens. The general population did not have the internet or even devices with which to use it. It took great courage to invest in IT solutions and take the information technology route.”

In time, we’ll see what government leaders have that same digital courage — to succeed and fail — and encourage and empathize with others internally to do the same.

‘It’s about the people’

While the various iterations of these teams have different directives, histories and personalities, there’s a camaraderie of passion, purpose and sense of immediacy for civic change that unites everyone involved with the government digital service delivery community.

Our goal is to deliver a consistent, inclusive and delightful online experience across the whole of government. These are the guiding principles that drive our work, and should be the ‘North Star’ for any team driving digital change in their ministry:

People are at the centre of service and policy design, actively participating in government program development by telling us what they need and will use

People have a common way to identify who they are when they interact with us online through a single digital identity across government

People don’t have to inform multiple ministries every time they move or change information —government uses a ‘tell us once’ approach to data and information

People have an easier time completing a task with government because common transactional elements are in place for all online services (e.g., payments, notifications, etc.), and designed to be interchangeable and built with open standards

People can track the progress we’re making because open performance metrics are available online for all services (e.g., UK Government Digital Service Performance)

While the delivery is digital and technology is foundational, the mantra for this community is the end users — the people — both internal and external.

When the universal driver is an emphatic focus on the user, the distractions — politics, bureaucratic skepticism and complacency, egos — all become tertiary for leaders and practitioners truly acting in the interest of the people they serve.

Intrigued by what Democracy Earth Foundation is doing to leverage the power of blockchain to empower a different approach to democracy, I asked the team to share more about its work.

What is Democracy Earth Foundation?

Democracy Earth Foundation is a California 501(c)(3) non profit that is building a blockchain-based, tokenized liquid democracy governance platform. We are an international team building in an open source environment.

What are the problems you’re trying to solve?

Our world is facing increasing globalization, privatization and digitalization: these forces are changing what it means to be a citizen and a human on earth. These changes have manifested primarily in the economic and political sphere, where vast inequality has created an unsustainable crisis of global proportions.

In the economic sphere, 600 million people still live on less than two dollars a day. While inequality between nations is gradually falling, it remains extraordinarily high. Inequality within countries is also rising – a condition economists like Thomas Piketty warn will not naturally correct itself. There are many reasons for this rising inequality within countries — in developed nations globalization has mainly rewarded the wealthy class while hurting the lower classes with manufacturing outsourcing. A lower share of profits is going to labor than to capital, especially in the tech sector. This precarious economic situation will only worsen with the advance of automation.

Meanwhile, in the political sphere, democracy is in global recession. Citizen voices are either suppressed under authoritarian regimes, or depressed by lack of financial and political capital which marginalizes participants. According to Freedom House, 55% of the world’s population live in countries that are deemed “not free.” Even in democracies, citizens who feel they are not represented well lack the means to change this. Participation rates are low in elections and money seems to control every aspect from how districts are drawn, to which political demands get answered. We view this political breakdown primarily as a liquidity problem – people who most need political change do not have the resources to bring it about – as well as a legitimacy problem, because centralized and easily corruptible ledgers of political institutions do not create trust or a desire to engage among citizens.

We aim to upgrade democracy to the Internet era, formalizing humans on blockchains and enabling new forms of participation and representation that enable global citizens to address the problems that nation-states and digital monopolies have proven inadequate for the task.

How does cryptography and blockchain solve these?

Liquid democracy – in combination with blockchain technology – is at the core of the Democracy Earth governance platform. Liquid democracy is a system that allows for both direct democracy and representative democracy. Instead of having representatives based on territory who vote on all issues for their constituents, liquid democracy allows individuals to choose representatives that are experts on narrow policy issues or members of their social network. If they feel that their representative voted incorrectly or if they change their mind on the issue they can revoke that vote at any time. It creates a more flexible system that enables greater participation while still allowing for knowledgeable representation.

Liquid democracy has only recently become feasible. Any notion of delegating and revoking with paper ballots would be functionally impossible due to its sheer complexity, but the internet makes sending someone a vote, tracking how they used it, and revoking the vote if dissatisfied, very simple. Of course it is now common knowledge the internet is a highly insecure place to hold elections; there is substantial evidence that the 2016 US election was manipulated through hacked voting machines. Making elections more digital on the current internet would be foolish; centralization is fundamentally incompatible with democracy. The Democracy Earth network will be based on blockchain technology.

Blockchains allow for information to be stored in a decentralized manner that makes it functionally impossible to manipulate – in a word, incorruptible. A blockchain is a distributed ledger system. A ledger is a record or database full of data such as transactions or votes, and distributed means that this ledger is held in multiple places. This ledger is maintained by “nodes,” essentially computers running a program that is specific to that blockchain. A copy of the ledger is held on every node in the network. Anyone who downloads this program can view the ledger and know that the copy they are viewing will be constantly updated and checked against everyone else’s copy to ensure that they match perfectly. They are kept synchronized because all the nodes are connected to the internet and are able to update in real time.

These nodes use a special consensus algorithm to make sure that they all are holding a ledger with the same information and history, and to overpower this algorithm, someone would have to take control of more than half of the computing power (known as a ‘51% attack’) in order to convince the network to change this ledger or to add false information.

This is what makes blockchains so special. To change data in a centralized source, like standard websites, someone only has to gain access to one point; in contrast, with a blockchain one has to overpower hundreds or thousands of points. While centralized sites keep their data and algorithms secret, with blockchains, anyone can view any transaction at any time. This ‘permissionless auditing’ means anyone can audit the information to make sure it is accurate, without needing access provided by intermediaries.

Though blockchains store information publicly and are easy to audit, they still preserve anonymity. Recorded in the ledger are data alongside digital public keys. Every user has a pair of digital keys: a public one, which anyone can see but cannot trace back to the user, and a private one, which they use to access their data and they know is linked to the public key. This allows them to check the ledger to see that their data were recorded correctly, but makes it so others cannot see who conducted which transactions or cast which votes.

There’s a lot of instability, volatility even, around blockchain technologies, particularly bitcoin. Is this technology stable enough to support global currencies and democracies? If not, when can we be comfortable that they can?

This is a multi-part answer.

The first to address is that our platform is running on the Ethereum blockchain. The price of Ether (Ethereum’s currency) also fluctuates but it should be noted that our VOTE tokens are a separate token from Ether, and the Ethereum blockchain is just providing the security for our platform and our platform is essentially a structure built on top of it. What is more important to focus on than the fluctuations in price, which are mainly driven by speculation not any real changes in the technology, is the security of a blockchain itself. Both Ethereum and Bitcoin are highly secure blockchains with many validating nodes and robust communities of users and developers. Even with the price fluctuating, using these ledgers to store information — such as votes as we propose to do — is completely doable.

There is a question about scaling. At the present moment, the Ethereum network would not be able to support the number of users and votes associated with a global democracy. That being said, every blockchain based project that aims to use the Ethereum blockchain faces this same issue of scaling which means that huge investments of time, money, and intellectual effort are going into fixing this problem right now. Multiple solutions for scaling have already been proposed and are in the process of being implemented.

What is Sovereign and how does it work?

Sovereign is the working name of the Democracy.Earth liquid democracy governance software. It is a platform that allows users to propose ideas, create votes, debate issues, vote directly and delegate (as well as revoke) their vote. It is censorship-resistant; voters neither give away personal information to participate, and can vote anonymously on any proposal for which they meet the requirements. Our beta release is now on the Ethereum Rinkeby testnet at testnet.democracy.earth, where you can experiment with censorship-resistant voting, debate and token delegation. The platform now has limited functionality, but you can vote with any token – our own VOTE tokens but also any ERC20 token(s). Results of polls are transparent and verifiable by all participants, not requiring an intermediary or vulnerable to any authority hacker. In addition to this testnet sandbox the platform is being used to provide governance among crypto communities like Decentraland. One interesting current use case of the platform can be found at Blockstack, where the Democracy Earth platform is implemented as part of the governance to the innovative App Mining program, helping to allocate a subsidy of $100,000 each month among dapp builders being voted on among the community.

What is the ‘Social Smart Contract?’

The Social Smart Contract is Democracy Earth Foundation open source white paper released in 2017. The language is not accidental – according to theorists such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, the social contract is an implicit agreement among the members of a society to cooperate for social benefits – i.e. the origin government itself. The social smart contract is similarly an agreement – and protocol – for how to implement this cooperation in the digital age. It puts the importance of blockchain technology and our governance protocols in the context of the challenges to democracy and human flourishing that we are witnessing in our world today, as well as a detailed explanation of our platform and its implementation. It is complemented by our Token Economics white paper, that was released in July 2018 at economics.democracy.earth.

You’re a big proponent of open source technologies? Why is open source important to your work and a healthy democracy?

The platform has to be open source so that the software is available to anyone for free and the code is transparently available for anyone who wants to see it, analyze it or modify it.

Open source is both an ethos and a series of procedures that are used for developing and updating code. It is an ethos because it is used by people who believe that software should be available for free, and have a truly democratic and meritocratic process of creation.

We believe this is the right way to build software, and also that it just makes for better software, especially governance software. It is a series of procedures, because it involves making our code available on an easily accessible website, for example GitHub (now owned by Microsoft), and allowing for others to copy it and propose changes or additions to it.

How can those excited about your work get involved?

There are many ways they can help.

The first and foremost is to join us on our platform: testnet.democracy.earth – you can get your test tokens and a simple guide on what’s involved with a Web3 login to joining our censorship-resistant platform on the Democracy Earth Medium publication, Hacktivism, at the article “testnet.democracy.earth is LIVE!” where they can create a profile, pose questions and votes, experiment on it, and invite other users to it join.

Next, if they have a particular vote or decision that they are involved with with any organization, they could use our platform to conduct it. For example, a board vote, a school election, a club election, or even a county or city election – they should reach out to the foundation at hello@democracy.earth to learn more about conducting a pilot.

Finally, they can look into becoming an ambassador meaning an individual who promotes the mission of Democracy Earth to the wider community. Or if you are at a university, consider becoming a student ambassador. Information about the program can be found at the Democracy Earth Student Ambassador repository in GitHub here.

If you are a developer, reach out to the development team at code.democracy.earth, and if you want to volunteer in any way, contributing your marketing, editing, writing, video, business or fundraising skills in some way to the foundation, simply reach out at hello@democracy.earth with your ideas, and someone will get right back to you.

Gary Kovacs is the new chief executive officer of Accela, a provider of cloud-based government productivity solutions.

Kovacs’ past experiences leading large enterprise technology companies include serving as CEO and managing director of the consumer and enterprise security software provider AVG Technologies; CEO of Mozilla where he led development of the Firefox web browser launch and its expansion to more than 500 million users worldwide; and senior executive leadership roles at SAP (Sybase), Adobe (Macromedia), Zi and IBM.

We asked him to share his perspective on various aspects of the government technology landscape, and where he sees Accela’s role in all this.

What do you see as the biggest technology challenge for governments?

We’re seeing governments need to quickly adapt to the rate of technological change and the shift in resident and business demand.

Technology is evolving at an exponential rate, not a linear rate, particularly as citizens interact with best-in-class technology in their lives every day, and increasingly demand the same from their government technology interactions. The ability for residents and businesses to react, praise, and critique government and elected officials is instantaneous now. Government and officials now must react quickly when their constituents are frustrated, or do not feel their interactions with agencies are simple, or meaningful enough.

These interactions and evolving technologies are accelerating the pace of necessary technological change within government. Harnessing this pace of change is challenging for even those with unlimited resources, which no one has. Implementation of technology solutions is a huge challenge.

I am focused on ensuring all of our solutions fit the demands and needs of our various customers and the communities they represent. I’m proud to be joining a team that already has unique domain expertise and a proven record of working with governments to leverage the best available technology and improve the delivery of services and thereby further community and economic development.

You previously worked with Mozilla, a free and open source project. How will your experience there impact the technology direction of Accela, and where do you see opportunities for open source contributions?

Open source technologies are an undeniable catalyst for new solutions, advanced tools, fresh thinking and transparency.

I joined Accela to help drive the next shift in government innovation, and as a company, Accela welcomes the growth of open source in government and is always looking for new opportunities to support this growth.

We’re encouraged by initiatives like California’s open source platform Code California, the federal government’s open source platforms through digital innovation groups like 18F and the U.S. Digital Service, and the work by local civic technologists at non-profits like Code for America, a group that has contributed many open source apps and tools to local governments.

These activities serve as a guiding light for how open source collaboration between government agencies and industry partners can solve real challenges facing cities and states throughout the country.

New industries are beginning to disrupt the economics of cities. What have governments done to regulate these new technologies?

Cities all across the country are navigating emerging regulatory challenges — from ride sharing registration in New York City to e-scooters in San Francisco, to cannabis regulation in towns coast to coast.

The 2018 election saw more states modify cannabis laws. With growing demand for recreational cannabis, and more cannabis businesses operating in legal markets, how are governments regulating this new industry?

Our country is increasingly going green — 10 states and Washington, D.C., already have recreational cannabis on the books. And more states are considering cannabis legalization in the nearterm. Local and state governments are scrambling to figure out how to regulate the product and collect cannabis revenue.

Earlier this year, we launched an out-of-the-box cannabis licensing product to make it easy for local and state leaders to keep up with this complicated emerging market. The cannabis solution follows Accela’s effort to help officials in Denver and California successfully launch their permitting systems ahead of schedule. Our experience in cannabis and looking at the market’s growth pushed us to develop an easy-to-use and easy-to-deploy solution for cannabis regulation and licensing.

What compelled you to join a government-focused technology company?

The focus on government and the delivery of government services has been at the forefront of our national dialogue over the past few years. I believe governments are at an inflection point with technology, and I became increasingly interested in exploring how the $400 billion government technology market could help government operate more efficiently. Governments worldwide have an opportunity right now to step up, embrace technology, and further improve their communities.

Accela offers a unique combination of software-as-a-service (SaaS) products, a loyal and growing customer base, and tremendous growth opportunities in the United States and internationally. This is an exciting time to join the company, and I look forward to partnering with our investors, leadership team, and all of our employees to help lead Accela on its mission to provide the best possible solutions for our customers and the residents and businesses they serve.

What will you focus on in your new role?

We will continue our focus on customer success — strategically allocating financial and human resources to support our customers now and into the future, as well as ensuring continual innovation as the leading provider of cloud-based solutions for government. A happy customer is of top importance to me. While we are investing in our core — a growing global team, research and development, strategic partnerships — we are also investing in our own SaaS transformation to ensure our government customers can benefit from all SaaS has to offer, especially our speed to deployment.

What excites you the most about the government technology space?

Broadly, government technology allows our public entities to better serve residents and businesses.

Accela is selling, implementing and supporting solutions that streamline transactions between governments and their residents and businesses. In short, Accela powers governments, so they are empowered to deliver important public services more efficiently and with greater transparency. I am thrilled to join an organization that already has a strong leadership team in place. From security to cloud, and customer success to marketing, the whole team is committed this mission.